“Super Mario Multiverse” – Wrecking Crew ’98 (SFC) by Timrod

Wrecking Crew ’98

by Timrod

Wrecking Crew ‘98 will probably never be seen as an important part of the Mario canon. It’s not a system-defining game the way Super Mario World or Mario 64 were, and it’s not hard to see why: it was released essentially as an afterthought to sell an obscure Super Famicom peripheral that came out two years after the Nintendo 64 and never saw a release outside of Japan. 

All of this adds up to a pretty good chance that this is the first time you’ve ever heard of it – I know that I hadn’t until I started following groups that dump unreleased SNES games for preservation purposes. 

In September 1997, a full two years after the Nintendo 64’s Japanese debut, Nintendo of Japan launched the Nintendo Power Cartridge – a sort of prototype to modern downloadable game systems like the eShop or Xbox Live Arcade. The Nintendo Power cartridge was the result of an experimental partnership between Nintendo and the Lawson convenience store chain and was effectively a Nintendo-sanctioned flash cartridge: for $35, you could buy a blank cartridge at any Lawson convenience store and then pay at the counter to have games written onto it for a lower price than buying a retail cartridge. 

To entice people to buy in, Nintendo released a number of games exclusive to the service, including Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 and Derby Stallion ‘98, in addition to Wrecking Crew ‘98. Keep in mind that this was at a time when some games retailed for as high as $80 in 1990s money, so buying a $35 cartridge and then paying some 15 to 20 dollars on top of that to have a game written onto it was considered cheaper than buying the retail release of some games. 

The Nintendo Power system had its downsides, though: the blank cartridge only had eight “blocks” of memory and could hold a maximum of seven games. It also couldn’t handle games that used enhancement chips, which by this point in the SNES’s lifecycle accounted for a pretty significant chunk of its library. This meant that they couldn’t re-release Yoshi’s Island or Kirby Super Star, in addition to a whole bunch of other games. There was also the problem of it using flash memory that was nowhere near as stable or reliable as the stuff you can buy today. Nintendo’s stance on it was that if it broke, people could just buy a new one. 

As far as the game itself goes, Wrecking Crew ‘98 isn’t really a Mario game so much as it is a Tetris Attack (or Panel de Pon) clone with some slightly different gameplay elements. It’s not really so much a sequel to the original Wrecking Crew as it is a completely different game – the only similarities are re-used design elements.

Even from the start of the game, you can kind of tell that the developers knew that what they were making wasn’t exactly going to be groundbreaking, though in a way it kind of is. The story mode has Mario come home from a vacation only to find that Bowser has apparently become a real estate speculator and has started putting up skyscrapers all over the Mushroom Kingdom that threaten to blot out the sun and kill all the plant life. In response, Mario goes home and grabs his magic hammer (which is apparently a thing he has now) and sets out to destroy Bowser’s skyscrapers by playing Panel de Pon.

What sets Wrecking Crew ‘98 apart from Tetris Attack is that instead of playing as a cursor, you’re playing as Mario platforming through the falling panels. Most of the panels come down hidden behind a layer of brick and have to be smashed with Mario’s hammer to reveal them. This can make generating chains of panel matches (a core gameplay mechanic in Tetris Attack) difficult due to not knowing what a given panel is until you’ve revealed it.

Moving the panels horizontally requires you to move Mario to the left side of the screen and turn a crank, not all of which are accessible at any given time. This can really slow down the game, as you can see a match but have to wait for platforms to appear so that you can reach it. To compensate, the rate at which new panels fall is extremely slow to the point where there’s a dedicated button to drop more panels.

Wrecking Crew ‘98 also has a copy of the original Wrecking Crew included, which is mostly the same as the NES version except that the level editor’s save functionality works – it didn’t on the NES due to technical limitations involving the Famicom Disk System and wasn’t fixed in time for the US cartridge release.

From a preservation standpoint, Wrecking Crew ‘98 was relatively lucky: Nintendo continued the Nintendo Power service until 2007, though by that point you had to mail the cartridges in to have games written onto them. This allowed preservationists to dump a cartridge copy of the game long before Nintendo eventually re-released it on the Wii U Virtual Console.. in Japan only, of course. All of the other Nintendo Power games (as far as I know) have similarly been preserved – either in their original format or from the retail releases a few of them received later on.

Let’s talk about another obscure SNES game that wasn’t so lucky. 

My favorite story about one of the unlucky games involves a title called BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, which was also released on a downloadable SNES cartridge. Ancient Stone Tablets was part of Nintendo’s other major business partnership involving the SNES, in which they partnered with a satellite radio service called St. GIGA to offer games that could be downloaded via decoding special radio broadcasts at specific times using a hardware addon called the Broadcast Satellaview, or BS-X.

The BS-X was both extremely obscure and extremely expensive. To use it, you not only needed the BS-X unit itself (at a cost of roughly $150), but also a $350 satellite receiver and a monthly subscription to St. GIGA, as well as a separate memory pack to store the games depending on which package you’d bought.

The only game the BS-X came with was a sort of hub game called The Town Whose Name Was Stolen, which served as the firmware for the BS-X. The hub game has been preserved and is playable both in an emulator and on real hardware, though no one has (yet) figured out how to restore functionality to the BS-X itself short of buying a radio station.

Once everything was set up, you then had to tune in to broadcasts of the game data at very specific times on specific weeks. Some games were released all at once (mostly re-releases of retail games) while others were released in parts by week. Ancient Stone Tablets was one of the latter types, and was only available for three different three-week periods between 1995 and 1996.

What made Ancient Stone Tablets so special is that it’s one of the first examples of ROM hacking I can think of, and also a rare example of a ROM hack made by the original developer. It’s a sort of remix of Link to the Past where instead of playing as Link, you’re playing as one of the characters from the BS-X’s game hub. Ancient Stone Tablets largely follows the latter half of Link to the Past and uses remixed versions of some of the same dungeons. The twist is that you only have an hour to do whatever it is you’re going to do – if you haven’t found the Triforce pieces or any of the other collectibles, you’re out of luck until next week. I played through the game and had no problem finding almost everything, but I can imagine that someone who hadn’t played Link to the Past before might have some difficulty there.

There were several major draws for Ancient Stone Tablets. The first was that it featured full voiceacting, transmitted through St. GIGA’s “Soundlink” channel (a separate channel from the game data) and only recovered years after the game had been dumped. The second was that it was part of a contest: each “week” of the game had certain things you could do to earn points, and you could submit your high scores to St. GIGA to be entered into a prize drawing.. which turned out to be for a RAM cartridge for the BS-X that you already had if you had played the game.

Due to general weirdness with how the game was transmitted, copies of the overworld data were available and stitched together from a couple of different ram cartridges purchased through Japanese auction sites.. but most of the data for the dungeon interiors was not. This was due to a quirk in the way the Satellaview worked: certain data was stored in a section of RAM that was typically lost when the power to the cartridge shut off. There’s a playable version of the game that exists today, and you might be asking how it is that could be if half the game was missing.

The answer is that preservationists found a recording on a VHS tape of someone playing through the game, and then used that to recreate the dungeon interiors by hand – meaning that the version that exists today is not the same thing that was transmitted by St. GIGA and Nintendo in 1995, though it’s quite convincing. Someone even found the original voiceover data and hacked it into the ROM, making it about as close to the original broadcast as you can get. There’s even a fan-made English language voiceover done by a group of fans.

It just goes to show how things like Let’s Play and speedruns are an important part of game preservation: had it not been for some random person who decided to record their playthrough of Ancient Stone Tablets, there’s a good chance that the dungeon interiors would have been lost forever and no one, outside of the subset of the few hundred thousand people who had an St. GIGA subscription and bothered to download the game during the original broadcast, would ever know what it was like to play.

Now, you might be asking why it’s so important that we have copies of these games: after all, Wrecking  Crew ‘98 was widely available and Ancient Stone Tablets was little more than a romhack. The answer is that it’s not always about the game itself, but what people can do with it.

Take the Nintendo Power Cartridge as an example. In late 2019, an anonymous developer released his own remake of Super Mario Land on the SNES – using sprites made from the models used in the New Super Mario Bros games as well as handmade model-sprites for the enemies and other assets that haven’t been used in any of the other Mario games. Because someone had figured out how to write data to the Nintendo Power Cartridge, the developer was able to send out a handful of actual cartridges with the game on it to various media outlets to ensure that they’d eventually be dumped and playable by everyone.

And who knows – perhaps someday, someone will make a game like Wrecking Crew ‘98, only with online multiplayer and gameplay tweaks to make it flow better. 

Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more: